For the past four years, I’ve put pen to paper for the Criterion. Or in my case, fingers to keyboard. Four years have been spent blankly staring at the screen, trying to figure out that earth-shattering lead to the story I was assigned for the week. I went from being assigned stories to assigning them and from writing one story a week to writing as many as four stories a week.
And that is how this column started; blankly staring at the screen for over an hour. But this one’s much harder than before. Four years have centered on reporting the news. So what’s the news? It’s time to graduate. It’s also time to say goodbye.
Goodbye to friends that started as awkward acquaintances and became closer than family. Goodbye to the welcoming campus that makes you feel right at home. Goodbye to the dorms where anything can happen at any time. Goodbye to the late night cram sessions and all-nighters just to write a paper. Goodbye to the random Monument and Wal-Mart trips and photo shoots. Goodbye to writing stories for the paper and staying until all hours of the morning to lay out the paper. Goodbye to the drunken nights full of fun and waking up the next morning just to recap what happened. Goodbye to being able just to float through life without a care in the world as to what happened.
When going through college, it doesn’t seem like these things matter that much or that they’ll make that much impact on you later in life. It’s when you’re a graduating senior and you look back and realize that everything meant something. Everything has an impact. There’s a lesson to be learned in everything that happens. But everyone says that when they reflect. Everyone learned a lesson after they reflected on it, but it’s what you do with those lessons that makes the real impact.
So look at the finer things in life as you go through them and learn from them. When you’re upset that the guy you were certain you were going to marry doesn’t talk to you anymore, think about how infinitely happy you are with your new boyfriend. Or remember those water fights you had in the dorm bathrooms and the late night drives around town. When you get in a fight with your best friend and don’t think they’ll forgive you, remember the time she held your hair while you were throwing up because you drank too much after that guy dumped you. Remember that if you can overcome that together, a little fight won’t hurt.
When you move away from your roommate after living together for three years, remember that you only live a few blocks away and you can still hang out and text. Remember the nights she snuck into your room and scared you before going to bed. When you are stressed out with school and don’t think you’ll make it, remember the last time you felt that way and what helped you through it. Remember the break you took to dance and calm yourself down or make a cup of coffee before tackling that pesky paper again.
It’s the simple things in life that make college worth it. It’s not the crazy drunken nights that make college fun; it’s overcoming the odds and realizing that you were able to smile through it all. So when reflecting this year, seniors especially, and when you’re looking at moving away from the life you’ve made in Grand Junction, don’t forget all the times you didn’t think you’d make it, and you did.
So as I lift my pen off paper and fingers off the keyboard one last time, I want to say thank you. Thank you to everyone that made this journey worth it. Listing names would take a whole separate newspaper, and I don’t want to put my staff through that. To everyone that was a part of my journey through college, I wouldn’t be where I am today if it weren’t for you and your part you played in my life, no matter how short or long. Thank you, Mesa State, for letting me bring you the news for four years. It has been long, but well worth it.